Government Internet Shutdowns Cost $19.7B in 2025 1/9/26, 2:49 PM apps for no more than 90 minutes at a time, and only from a small number of cell towers around exam centers. This highly targeted approach sharply reduced the economic impact and didn’t meet the threshold for inclusion in this report. Algeria went further still, appearing to impose no exam-related shutdowns at all in 2025, contributing to a 65% year-over-year reduction in the overall impact of this type of shutdown. Jordan’s approach underscores that highly targeted, minimal disruptions can mitigate economic fallout, contrasting with the broader costs of indiscriminate shutdowns. By contrast, shutdowns carried out for the purpose of information control weren’t only frequent, but also prolonged and economically devastating. Measured by cost, duration, and number of incidents, this was the single largest driver of internet disruption worldwide in 2025. It also marked the first time since we began tracking the cost of internet shutdowns (in 2019) that information control overtook all other contexts across every major metric. DETAILS OF INDIVIDUAL INTERNET SHUTDOWNS: Download the Cost of Internet Shutdowns 2025 data sheet for a detailed breakdown of every incident. For each shutdown, the dataset includes dates, affected regions, economic cost estimates, outage type, blocked platforms, estimated population impact, and the stated justification. While we report 212 shutdowns in 2025, the dataset contains more entries. This is because individual incidents are often split into multiple segments to accurately calculate their economic impact. https://www.top10vpn.com/research/cost-of-internet-shutdowns/ Page 20 of 33